Rules: just pick 1 and explain why.
I’ve been playing since the NES and despite being from a low income family I had the luck of being able to play and own many consoles over the 3 decades of my life, plus some pc.
If you ask me right now? Resident Evil 4 (2005).
A before and after in gaming, to this day still extremely fun to play even for casuals but 20 years ago it was THE masterpiece. And everyone took notice of it, everyone played it, even players that didn’t cared about resident evil. The gameplay was so good that it got photocopied by everyone right after in the action genre.
Arguably the last big innovator in videogames minus Minecraft and… PUBG (Fortnite did it better I know).
Try to NOT pick your favourite game, that’s a different thing.
It doesn’t hold up but while it was happening I don’t think there was a better gaming experience than Vanilla WoW. Obviously for some it wasn’t the first MMO experience, but for many it was, and it was pure magic.
The random friends made, and mortal enemies you would drop everything you were doing to try and kill. Spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon(read wailing caverns) for the first time with random people you met in chat. Getting your first mount, walking into molten core with 39 other people and killing your first raid boss. Getting your first epic. The stupidity of barrens chat/whatever the equivalent the scumbag alliance had. The first time you had guild mates come to your rescue when some no-life higher level person was camping you and it devolving into an impromptu war between everyone in the zone and their friends. That time you pulled off an epic 1 v 2. Shit talking all the other classes in your guilds class chat during raids.
The drama ohh the drama, the e-gf/bf that became peoples husbands and wives, the guild leaders wife e-humping half the guild. Relationships destroyed because someone would rather spend their time in azeroth that just about anything else.
Drooling over the gear the best players on the server had. Battling on the front lines of alterac valley all night, going to bed and rejoining the same battle, sometimes to cheers from your fellow soldiers that you had rejoined the fight.
I don’t think there will ever be anything like it again, we know too much, have access to to much info, but for that brief period in time wow was the greatest game ever.
FFXIV is better. I like the fights better and the lore better. It’s a great social platform, but I think it has jumped the shark. Still a great concept. For very similar reasons.
Wow took over my life for a while there, and then again with WoTLK. The 2v2 and 3v3 arenas were so much fun. The cool thing was that it wasn’t grindy in the beginning, you could just run quests at your level and level up at a reasonable pace while exploring the game. I had played Everquest before WoW and that game required so much grinding just to get a level, sometimes it would take weeks.
GTA 5 is the most high quality game ever made I think, story graphics gameplay it’s truly number 1
Space station 13 is peak gameplay though, completely organic with amazing depth
The first six weeks of GTA Online are my favorite gaming memories. I was working 8 hours, gaming 12 and sleeping 4. I’m still friends with people i met in the racing lobbies…
I know exactly one person who plays SS13, and nothing they have ever said about it makes it sound appealing.
That said, it’s usually because they’re complaining about getting banned for some mean spirited thing they did. And I have been very impressed with how deep those mean spirited things can go.
earthbound. my first RPG that I understood, plus SNES is GOAT.
You understood Earthbound? You understood the game that expects you to wait for like five minutes outside a waterfall without doing anything to progress?
I mean, the game is great, no lie, but understandable is not the first thing that comes to mind.
I understood the enemies actually there, not the invisible random ones from games like dragon quest. I had the guide book that came with the game :)
Earthbound was great!
Zelda, the entire series/franchise. The OG RPG. Many argue it isn’t an RPG because the original you couldnt level up but when I think of RPG, I think you are a character and you go on an adventure. It also serves as a good gateway to fixed RPGs where everyone basically has the same story. And to strategy video game as a whole. Also, it was Nintendo’s first RPG, when PlayStation and Xbox still did not exist. And the Best console is Nintendo since it lasted so long. Many of the other consoles feel like less of a game and more like your are in an interactive movie.
The entire series, are you sure about that?
Freshly picked Tingles Rosy Rupeeland is a masterpiece and the most important game in the series, I will not hear otherwise
Earthbound. The soundtrack is supreme
It’s a masterpiece of a game. I still recommend it to people and it holds up. I even bought a pirated copy of the print strategy guide for a play through.
This is such an absurd question. I mean, it’s weird in movies and books, weirder in music… but games?
I mean, Tetris. It’s Tetris, isn’t it?
But then you’re out there going “so is Tetris better than Baldur’s Gate III”, which is a nonsensical sentence.
It’s kind of like asking for the best video.
It wouldn’t make sense to compare TV shows, movies, Youtube videos, TikToks, sporting events, commercials, journalistic footage, etc. all as a single category.
Idk. So do you ask for “best RPG” or something like that instead? Seems overly specific now.
I feel like this is just a question to learn more about other people. I don’t care if someone’s favourite is tetris when mine is sonic. I just wanna be reminded of fun games and hear a passionate argument as to why they think it should be top of my list :)
Yeah no, it’s a totally fair question and I get the spirit of it, but it’s still interesting to reflect on the way that video games have a pretty strange concept of genre or “format” vs. other media like video or print.
Maybe it’s cuz games are so heavily influenced by their associated hardware.
I mean, I guess everything is, right? Early printing press is mostly pamphlets not books (aside from the bible), and you don’t get TV shows without TVs.
Yeah it’s a good point. Wonder if we’ll ever see a tik tok video go up against a short film at the oscars ;)
Yeah, for sure. The real answer is the question is superfluous. There is no number one. I’d say you can’t even put together a top 10. It’s just not a thing you need to do or can do.
Is it? Minecraft is the most sold game, which to be fair Tetris held for a very long time.
You’re kinda making my point, that’s another absurd choice to have to make.
But no, it’s Tetris.
That’s a good question. Tetris has more levels but then again BG3 has better character customisation.
Weirdly, better sex scenes in Tetris.
I wanted to post a DOS game here I remembered called Sextris where the pieces were cartoony naked men and women in positions representing the shapes of the tetris pieces. But all I could find when I searched were versions of the regular game where nudie photos were slowly revealed as you cleared lines.
Hah. I remember Sextris. The great thing about it is that it was entirely unsexy, mostly just for laughs and actually not a bad version to play, for the standards of the time.
When you rotate the T like one just right. 🥵 💦💦💦
Unironically true
Asteroids
Twisted Metal or Resident Evil
Well, I guess my answer could change depending on you how define “best,” but I think my answer has to be Dwarf Fortress. I’ve been playing it longer than some posters on here have been alive! The emergent narratives of your forts and your dorfs combined with the constant drip-feed of updates makes it endlessly replayable. The main game theme has been my last-call morning alarm basically since I had a cell phone that replaced an alarm clock. It’s a game I come back to time and again that has yet to get old. If anything, it’s getting too complex for my stupid ass lol
I second this. I only started playing it once it was in steam, it just wasn’t on my radar before that. Now I wish I had found it back in the day.
Maniac Mansion or Zack McKraken on the Commadore64. At the time…at that age… we were living in the future, and it was amazing.
Mount and Blade Warband.
So many games you start off or become something great. In Skyrim you’re the dragonborn, you become great but you were always going to. The world is huge and immersive, but you’re always going to be important in the world.
In warband, you’re a nobody. You’ll always be a nobody unless you do something. Trade, fight, quest or scheme. The world will continue with or without you. Your favourite faction might get wiped out and you can do something about it or not. There’s no guarantee of victory, and what you decide as a win condition is up to you.
It is the ultimate sandbox, but the original is janky. The solution; mods. An incredibly dedicated modding community elevates this game into my most played game. The lord of the rings mod is both the best way to get into the game and in my opinion the best video game adaptation of a movie (just in front of kotor).
TL:DR: Warband makes it ok to suck and makes you earn your victory. You might not think that’s fun, but trust me it can be.
Dam you. Its on my wishlist and I dont need to buy more! Loved the original too
Not a single game but a series. Legacy of Kain is still my absolute favorite not because of replay ability or anything like that but because of the story.
“What madness is this?” 😉
XCOM
You better be talking about DOS X-COM UFO Defense or I’ll send a blaster bomb down your gullet :o
…I sadly didn’t know about the series until the new ones in 2012. I’ve played the hell out of them and do want to go back and play the DOS ones sometime.
The remakes are solid for sure but they’re pretty different games that don’t quite fully capture the spirit of open ended gameplay you could do in the originals.
For example:
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Grenade relay involving 5 soldiers passing across the map until it lands at the foot of a Muton your out of actions scout ended his turn next to
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Blow a hole in the roof of a landed UFO and drop your soldiers in behind aliens watching the doors expecting a conventional assault
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Drive a tank into a single family home to dig out an alien hiding in a closet
Amazing. Some of my favorite experiences in the new ones have also been creative problem-solving, like rocketing open a hole in a wall to allow my snipers to see through, or trying to carry my injured/dead soldiers with the good loot to extraction when I have to cut my losses and run.
Sounds like I should just go ahead and play the old ones too. I started one up earlier this year, but it wasn’t clear what all the buttons did, and I didn’t have the focus to figure it out. I need to look up the manual or watch a video or something.
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Castle Wolfenstein, it took 2D and made it POV 3D, really can’t explain how much of a reality changer that was at the time, and since. Only had to wait an hour for the 1MB file to download over a 24.4k Modem from a pirate BBS, but then you were fucking golden.
Someone already said my true #1. But if I ignore that one.
EverQuest. What a crazy game. So many ideas that are just brilliant but people don’t do anymore. The enchanter is my favorite power set on any character in any genre and nothing touches it. I wish the design philosophy didn’t move away from systems that enable that kind of game play.
